I rode to work all three days this week. Today was my 61st commute by bike this year.

The last two days, I haven’t been able to get my heart rate nearly as high as usual. Even a sprint to make a traffic light, and I only have a 135 heart rate. I’ve ridden 8 of the last 10 days, and I think my body is telling me it’s tired. I’m taking the next two days off the bike before I ride a 200k on Saturday.

Climbing a hill shortly after I left work for home this afternoon, I met a typical Fort Worth urban cyclist, coming from the other direction. He was riding a cheap mountain bike, basket on the front, on the wrong side of the street (he moved over when he saw me), baseball cap, jeans, and cigarette hanging from his mouth. Nothing more fun than meeting another serious cyclist.

Here is a copy of the email I just sent to Julia McCleeary, who is the senior planner for the City of Fort Worth’s Bike Fort Worth Plan. The Bike Fort Worth Plan actually looks very good, but I’m sure not seeing much progress on it. It’s probably suffering from lack of funding. Anyway, here’s the email:

Julia:

Today is National Bike to Work Day, so it seemed a fitting time to write this. I live in Crowley and commute to my job on McCart Street in Fort Worth. I ride to work more often than I drive. I wanted to comment on what I think is the single biggest problem that commuting cyclists face here. It’s the lack of slow speed routes, especially in suburban Fort Worth. You do give this a mention in your plan, but I think it should be emphasized much more.

You can find a map of my route from work to home on Bikely at: http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Crowley-Commute-return2 . The biggest problem with this route is the eastbound stretch on Sycamore School Road. The right lane is full of impatient drivers who are trying to turn into the apartments just before Crowley Road, and many of them become irate with me because of the few seconds I delay their arrival home.

A better route for me would be this: http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Crowley-Commute-return . It goes through slower speed neighborhood roads, and avoids the higher speed, less bike friendly Sycamore School Road. But, unlike google maps shows, Risinger Road and Carolina Drive don’t actually intersect. They both dead end with barricades, just one city block apart. I’ll repeat that: DEAD END, BARRICADES, ONE CITY BLOCK APART! If you zoom in on this intersection in google maps, then switch to satellite mode, you’ll see what’s really there. If I want to use this route, I have to walk my bike a block, around barricades, over rock piles, through mud and shoulder high weeds. A one block long bike path would fix this, and provide a low speed route to get from Fort Worth to the wide and smooth shoulder of Crowley Road.

You can find neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood just like this. The bike friendly, low speed, neighborhood roads dead end just short of connecting to anything, forcing bike riders to use higher speed, higher traffic roads to get anywhere. This is the biggest single obstacle to safe destination based bike riding in Fort Worth that I have found, and should get the highest priority in any bike plan, I believe. Take a look at maps of suburban parts of Fort Worth, and see how many areas don’t quite let you get anywhere on neighborhood roads. Short bike paths connecting these neighborhoods would be less expensive to build than long, elaborate bike paths, and make the most difference in improving bike riding in the city.

I hope you’ll take a close look at this, and give it consideration as you move forward with the Bike Fort Worth Plan. Thanks for your efforts.

Bud Baker
Crowley, TX

I had a nice ride to work at dark-thirty this morning. It was 64 degrees with a light northwest wind. Getting back home ended up being a little tougher. Wouldn’t you know it that the day the weatherman forecasts sunny and dry ends up being the commute day I end up getting the wettest?

My ride home Friday had looked a little iffy, too. At 3:00 pm, a half hour before I get off work, it was pouring so hard that Rose sent me a text, asking if I wanted her to pick me up. The weather radar looked like it was going to let up, so I answered no, it wouldn’t be the first time I got wet on the bike.

Sure enough, right on cue, five minutes before I took off for home, the rain let up. I never hit anything more than a light rain on the way home. The roads were wet enough that I was glad I had fenders on the SXP, though.

Today, I got within three miles of home, then the downpour hit. Twice, when wind gusts reached 50 to 60 mph, I stopped and took refuge for a few minutes. A mile from home, I was coming down a hill to a stop sign. I was watching the intersection, rather than the road in front of me, and forgot how deep the water can get at the low spot in the road just before the intersection.

I hit the water too fast, then hit my brakes too hard, and was down on my right side instantly. Thankfully, skidding on concrete that has 11 inches of water on it removes a lot less skin than skidding on dry concrete, and I only suffered a minor scrape on my right arm.

As I stood in the garage, wringing the water from my skullcap, Rose stepped out of the house, took one look at me, and said, “Oh well, it’s not like you haven’t gotten wet before.”

It was 75 degrees, cloudy, and humid with a 20 mph south wind as I rode to work this morning. It’s supposed to get up to near 90 degrees again this afternoon.

As I was riding north on a flat stretch of Crowley Road just before Sycamore School Road, a Fort Worth Police cruiser pulled up beside me. The officer rolled down his window and said, “Just so you know, I clocked you doing 25 mph”. We both laughed (I was in a 50 mph zone). He asked if I was always that fast on a flat road. I pointed out that I had a good tailwind this morning. He drove on, and as he pulled up to the red light at Sycamore School Road, I slowed and crossed behind him to get in the left turn lane. Just before I pulled up to the light, it turned green. This is one of those left-turn-on-arrow-only lights. My bike almost never triggers the arrow, so I normally just turn on a regular green light. On this morning though, I stopped and waited for the next light as I watched the police car travel through the light.

It will be a tough ride back against that wind this afternoon, just like yesterday.

With boulderseal taking over so many of our Texas roads, I decided to try some wider tires for my randonneuring. Wider tires can improve handling and the ride on rough roads a lot. But, I spend so much randonneuring time trying to ride with riders who are faster than me that I didn’t want to give up much speed with new tires.

I’m always surprised at how many people dispense tire width advice without even thinking about what kind of bike the target of the advice is riding. When it comes to tire width, all bikes are not created equal. Bikes that put the rider’s profile completely above the tires are much more aerodynamically affected by wider tires than bikes that use small front tires and/or put the rider behind the front tire. A wider front tire may not slow down a low racer much, but it can certainly slow down a high racer. And even on my Stratus XP, which has a fairing and has me partially behind the front tire, I could see a noticeable difference in speed when I ran wider tires, although it isn’t nearly as pronounced as it is on the Corsa. Of course, how much difference tire width makes is the subject of unending debate, and a very individual thing that depends on the rider and the roads ridden. You can do coast down comparisons, but rides are much more than just coasting down hills, so that doesn’t really tell you much.

One of the things that finally jogged me into trying wider tires was the thinking held by some that aero wheels, especially wide aero wheels, can help with the aerodynamics of a wider tire, keeping you from losing much speed with them. I already had a set of aero wheels, which I rebuilt for this experiment. I documented rebuilding them in this post. Most riders don’t use their expensive, delicate, low spoke aero wheels for randonneuring, but mine don’t fit that description. They’re old mtb wheels which have 32 spokes, so should be pretty strong, and even after rebuilding them, I don’t have cubic dollars invested in them.

There are people who will tell you that aero wheels actually do better in the wind than regular wheels, but don’t believe that for a minute. They might be faster, but in a 50 mph crosswind, you’ll like regular wheels much better than aero ones. With a 30 or 40 mph wind, aero wheels still aren’t much fun. But with 20 mph or less winds, mine handle well. Since I don’t face winds harder than 20 mph on rides really often, I figured that problem isn’t a deal breaker for me, so I decided to give these wheels a long run as my randonneuring wheels.

I had always run 559×25 Conti GP’s on these wheels. These are fast tires. On my HED wheels, I didn’t notice much difference in speed from my old 650c wheels and 23 tires, other than slightly better speed on fast descents. And even a tire that’s only 2 mm wider than the 23’s makes a difference in ride on rough roads. The GP 25’s never handled any better than my 23’s, though. I expect that’s because a Conti GP just doesn’t handle quite as well as a Michelin Pro Race, which is what I ran when I ran 23’s.

But the experiment wouldn’t be complete until I tried 28 mm tires on the HED wheels. I installed new Conti GP 28’s last week, and Saturday’s Peachy Keene was my first ride with them. I own this route and ride it often, so I figured it would be a good route for comparisons. The 559×28 GP’s do look a bit silly on aero wheels, but I don’t worry too much about making a fashion statement these days, anyway.

How much tire pressure to run is a debate, by itself. The GP 28’s have a max of 116. I wanted to make sure to run enough pressure that I couldn’t blame being slower on tire pressure, so Saturday, I inflated the rear to 108 and the front to 100 pounds. Peachy Keene has some rough county roads, but almost no boulderseal. Tire pressure experimentation will be necessary, and I’ll likely end up running lower pressures than that on routes which are mostly boulderseal.

Before I get into the comparisons, let me remind once more that everyone is different. How valid my comparisons would be for anyone else is questionable. Also, I’m only an average speed rider. Since aerodynamics becomes a much bigger factor with speed, my findings especially wouldn’t apply to a really fast rider. And Peachy Keene isn’t the fastest of 200k routes. It is lots of very small county roads, with blind curves and stop signs, and lots of turns. My personal best time on this route is a 9:30, which I did two months ago. For comparison, My personal best time on any 200k is an 8:06 on Rio Vista Rumble. My best time on a 200k since losing half a lung to a surgeon is an 8:40, also on Rio Vista Rumble. It’s plainly a faster route than Peachy Keene. Anyway, the bottom line is that if you’re capable of a 7 hour 200k, my ramblings here certainly don’t apply to you.

I rode with Steve and Peggy Saturday. One of the first things to do was compare coast downs with them. They are both light, strong riders who can drop me like a bad habit whenever they want. But, with my aerodynamic bike setup (I have a lot of seat recline, and with my long arms, have the handlebar low, out in front of my upper shins, much lower than where my knees are at their highest point), and gravity assist (I weigh 186 right now), on downhills, I out-coast almost everyone I ride with. With the 28’s on Saturday, I still out-coasted Steve and Peggy. In the 20 to 25 mph range, my coasting advantage seemed pretty much the same as usual. At above 25 mph, I still out-coasted them, but not as much as usual. Not too much of a penalty, I figured, since I don’t spend too many miles above 25 mph on these long rides.

A comparison between Saturday’s ride and my ride on Peachy Keene two months ago seems like a natural. Conditions were very similar. On both rides, things started with a tailwind, but quickly changed. Two months ago, it was a hard southeast wind that showed up after a couple of hours. Saturday, it was a straight east wind. Temperatures were almost the same for both rides. I would normally expect to be a bit stronger for a May ride than a March one, but I hadn’t ridden 200k or more in a month, because of the shingles I’ve had for the last three weeks. My strength for the two rides is probably very similar. My effort for both rides was, too. On both rides, I rode a brisk (for me) pace.

I did the March ride mostly by myself. As often happens when I do that, my stops were very short. Saturday, chatting non-stop with Steve and Peggy, my stops were a bit longer. Here are the stats:

On March 14th, I spent less than an hour off the bike, pretty good for me for a 200k. The bottom line is that I put out a slightly harder effort Saturday, and had a slightly better time. I’m thinking that, just as it felt, the speed of these 28’s is really close to that of the 25’s, and to that of the 650C x 23’s before them. And the ride of the 28’s is pretty unbelieveable, comparison-wise. I quickly got very confident on the roughest parts of the road, and handling was easily the best I’ve ever seen on the Corsa.

I bought these 559×28 Conti GP’s knowing that if I didn’t like them for randonneuring on the Corsa, they’d work well as commuting tires on the Stratus XP. As well as they performed on Saturday, there’s going to be a lot more randonneuring miles on them before I try anything else.

Update: I eventually ended up going back to my 650C wheels with 23mm wide tires on my Corsa. As much as I liked this wider tire setup, I’ve decided that deep aero wheels like the HED’s are just too tough to handle in big windy day crosswinds, like we have all too often in Texas, to make good every day wheels. Continue reading →

Steve, Peggy, and I rolled out of southwest Arlington at 7:00 am this morning to ride the Peachy Keene 200k permanent. It was in chilly, in the upper 50’s when we started out, with a stiff northeast wind just kept blowing harder, and became a straight east wind before long, and blew all day.

We made pretty decent time to Cleburne, but when we turned east at mile 52, the wind was pretty tough all the way to Itasca, then to Maypearl. It was then mostly a tailwind to Alvarado, and more a crosswind than anything else for most of the remaining miles.

I love the small Johnson County county roads on this route. There are lots of trees overhanging these roads, and today, the smell of honeysuckles was everywhere. It was a great ride with great company, I really enjoyed it. For the first time, I ran 28mm wide tires on my Corsa today. I really like them; I’ll do a separate review on them.

I ended up with 124.6 miles, and finished the ride in 9:52. Thanks for inviting me along, Steve and Peggy!

Peachy Keene route

Rose and I headed out to Benbrook for a short ride this morning. Greg joined us on the VK2. It was a beautiful, cool morning, but the northwest wind was howling. Other than a few blocks around the neighborhood, this was Rose’s first ride in a long time, so it was good to see her back on the bike.

I ended up with 26 miles. That, combined with my three commute rides gave me 101 miles for the week. I’m thinking that’s not bad, considering it was my first week with shingles.

It was 50 degrees as I rode to work this morning, and 75 degrees as I headed home this afternoon. Today was my first ride since I was diagnosed with shingles on Sunday. A recumbent bicycle seat is usually the most comfortable bicycle seat of all, but with the worst of my shingles rash on the middle of my back, that seat back was no fun today. I’m thinking I’ll try to ride to work anytime I feel up to it, though, since I’ll likely not try any long distance rides until I’m well.

I rode the bike to work today. It was 59 degrees this morning, then 78 degrees as I headed home. I ran into a shower just as I left work, but it didn’t last long, and the roads were dry before I made it halfway home.

I took a detour at Risinger Road, turning right and checking out where it dead ends. I really don’t like riding on Sycamore School Road coming home, and I have found an alternate route that will keep me off of it. Tomorrow, I’ll try it out. Risinger Road and Carolina Drive dead end, less than a city block apart. It turns out you can navigate the barricades with a bike, with just a bit of walking. That will let me ride neighborhood streets rather than Sycamore School Road. Thank you, google maps.

Special thanks to Peggy and Mark M for organizing this ride. I had a blast. Some hardcore randonneurs might argue that the weather was too great or the route too easy, but it was still a grand adventure for this old f*rt.

We rode 7.5 miles from Lynn Creek Marina to the start of the ride in Duncanville, then at 8:00 am, Saturday, we were off. The route went out to Italy for the second control, then on to Dawson for the next. Winds stayed as light as I think I’ve ever seen on a long ride, so the southbound part of our ride never turned into the beating that a big headwind can cause.

After another control at Wortham, we arrived at Teague at mile 106, and stopped at a Dairy Queen to eat. Very hungry by that time, I had an extra long chili cheese dog and a blizzard. While I have been known to eat this very unhealthy meal on rare occasions, this was the first time I had ever downed anything this obscene on a randonneuring ride, and it wasn’t long before I was reminded why.

I felt like I had a concrete block on my stomach, and was just hanging on for the next 35 miles, through the Donie Post Office control, and on to Mexia. We made a longer stop at Mexia, rigging for darkness before pedaling on, and by the time we left, my stomach had settled. The easier pace because of darkness also helped, I think, and I felt good the rest of the ride.

There are serious time constraints for a fleche. You can’t finish too early, nor spend too long at one control. We were somewhat ahead of schedule by the time we arrived at the Hubbard Post Office at mile 164, so it was nap time there, before we moved on.

At Milford at mile 188, Linda M met us with hot food and coffee. I think you have to be a randonneur to really appreciate how great that was at 2:00 am. Thanks, Linda! It was a quicker stop at Maypearl at mile 204, but we spent a good while at the next to last control in Venus, at mile 215.

After a couple of stops for light battery replacements, we arrived at Lynn Creek Marina well within the proper time, and I had completed my first fleche. I had a great time, spending 24 hours riding and cutting up with this group. Mark did a great job with the route. His experience and expertise were obvious, having us on the best roads at the best time to be on them, and telling us what to expect and watch for on the entire route.

With the ride to the start, I ended up with just short of 243 miles, and another great rando adventure was in the books. Thanks for having me along, everyone!

360K Fleche route